Lexington Books
Pages: 224
Trim: 6⅜ x 9
978-1-7936-3054-4 • Hardback • June 2021 • $111.00 • (£85.00)
978-1-7936-3055-1 • eBook • June 2021 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
Ambigay Yudkoff is an independent scholar.
Chapter 1: Get on the Peace Train
Chapter 2: Creating a Platform for Musical Activism
Chapter 3: Glimpses of Musical Activism on a Transcontinental Journey
Chapter 4: Tracking and Triangulation through Film
Chapter 5: Replicating the Peace Train Model in the United States
Chapter 6: The Peace Train Rolls On
Ambigay Yudkoff has written a beautiful account of the musical activism of South African born music therapist and multilingual singer Sharon Katz. In the wake of the release of political prisoner Nelson Mandela and others in 1990, Katz created a "Peace Train," a large South African interracial youth choir for purposes of racial and cultural reconciliation, collaboration between strangers, who literally traveled South Africa and the United States in a train. This is not a conventional story about music and politics but far more about the need for social and emotional healing through singing together in the post-apartheid era. It is one of a few books on musical activism as a mode of social reparation and intercultural understanding that has value well beyond 1990s South Africa.
— Carol Ann Muller, University of Pennsylvania